Semiconductor devices comprise many devices such as transistors that are interconnected using metal lines. Traditionally, interconnect metallization comprised aluminum lines. However, aluminum metal lines exhibit higher resistances and poorer reliability than equivalent copper metal lines especially when the metal lines are scaled. Consequently, copper metal lines have been introduced at lower levels of metal interconnect for continued scaling of integrated circuit technology. However, the uppermost lines are conventionally fabricated using aluminum due to the complexity of using an all copper process. For example, copper is easily degraded when exposed to environment. Similarly, contacts pads if made of copper can corrode and/or oxidize during post fabrication operations such as handling, storage, wafer-level parameter/functional test, data retention bakes, and other backend processing. Therefore, great care has to be taken if copper is used in upper levels of metallization to avoid environmental effects. Alternatively, copper may be avoided from the uppermost metal lines to avoid environmental degradation, but results in degraded electrical performance of the semiconductor device.